


A Power Greater Than Ourselves

by stunrunner



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous, F/F, Grimdark, Implied vomiting, Lovecraftian, Psychic Violence, Sibling Incest, Tentacles, implied disordered eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 16:26:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2116728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stunrunner/pseuds/stunrunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxanne "Mom" Lalonde finally decides to get help for her alcoholism. When she goes to apologize to her sister Rose as part of her 12-step program, she gets caught up in helping her discover an ancient family secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Power Greater Than Ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Main Round 2 of the Homestuck Shipping World Cup 2014, where I was part of the fantastic Team Guardians, all of whom I love dearly.
> 
> Endless thanks to [gendersquare](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gendersquare) for his enthusiastic and skilled beta work, as well as my other HSWC 2014 team members for their helpful comments.

Professor English,

I hope you have been well these past months; I throw myself upon the altar of your forgiveness for my lack of correspondence since the school year ended. The faculty do dearly love their gossip, so you must already have heard about the tumultuous state of affairs in the Lalonde family. Thank whatever deity postponed this mess until after I'd concluded my book tour; with my siblings long since fled to all corners of the continent, my father's passing has left me alone to handle all the matters of the estate. I mention this not as an excuse for my poor communication skills, but merely as an explanation for how you have turned so many pages in your calendar without one of my surely eagerly anticipated missives. I am positive you were absolutely delirious with glee at the sight of a raised mailbox arm with a pink envelope poking coquettishly from the folds of advertising circulars and Rifles Monthly magazines.

In truth, while a host of domestic issues continue to fly at my face like an irritatingly persistent cloud of midges, they have actually proven less demanding than a personal project, of sorts, which has consumed far more of my time than previously anticipated. I fear I cannot speak of it via post, but there are some aspects of said project where I believe I would greatly benefit from your unique expertise.

For instance, are you still in possession of that old journal you found in Peru? I know you have repeatedly declared it completely untranslatable, but I may yet be able to extract some interesting tidbits from between the covers of that dusty tome.

Thank you again for your continued friendship and discretion. I shall be on tenterhooks awaiting your reply.

Sincerely,   
Rose Lalonde

***

The engineering conference that Dr. Roxanne “Mom” Lalonde was attending was surprisingly glamorous. Marble columns and plush carpeting lent an elegant touch to the decor, and everyone who was anyone in the field was in attendance.

The stained white porcelain of the ladies' room toilet, however, was decidedly less glamorous than the ballroom, and this was what filled Dr. Lalonde's blurry vision as she hovered over the bowl, catching her breath.

She could hear the clicking of a foot tapping impatiently against the tile floor outside the stall, and wished she could melt through the floor. 

“You almost done in there?”

Dr. Lalonde swallowed, grimacing at the taste of bile. “Yeah, 'm fine,” she slurred as she clambered unsteadily to her feet. 

When she came out, the older woman leaning against the wall with her arms folded shot her a disapproving look through her thick glasses, one that the bouncy gray curls wreathing her face did nothing to soften. “I can't say I'm terribly surprised, but this is still not what I envisioned when you invited me to be your guest for the evening, Dr. Lalonde.”

She straightened her lab coat with a tug and avoided the icy blue gaze. “C'mon, Crocker, I know you're an old crone and all but I thought you knew how to par-tay.” She jabbed an elbow jokingly into Mrs. Crocker's ribs.

“You know very well the 'par-tay' is out there. In here? This isn't fun, Roxanne. This is a problem. I've half a mind to finally send you to rehab myself.”

Dr. Lalonde stiffened and turned away to examine her reflection in the mirror. “I dunno what you're talking about. Is this one of your infamous ridiculous pranks? Cause if it is then just fast forward to the part where you tell me I got punk'd and finally loosen up a lil.”

Mrs. Crocker just sighed. “It isn't a joke. I hope you get the help you need, dear.”

Dr. Lalonde turned to respond, but found only empty air and the quiet click of the restroom door closing.

She stared at the door. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she looked up and blinked until they no longer threatened to spill onto her cheeks.

She leaned with her forehead pressed against the cool glass of the mirror. _Ok_ , she thought, _maybe it's a little bit of a problem. Rehab, huh?_ She met her own pale stare for a long moment before nodding to herself and tottering out of the hotel, hailing a taxi and flirting with the driver on autopilot.

It occurred to her just before she fell asleep in the backseat of the cab that she was rapidly speeding away from her last martini. She couldn't tell if she was relieved or terrified.

***

TG: yo mom whats a science word that rhymes with refrigerator   
TG: im laying down some sick fires for the next sbahj and i wrote myself into a corner here   
TG: i already used generator respirator and stimulator   
TG: the angles of the walls in this corner are getting more and more acute with every passing second   
TG: the geometry of this situation is becoming increasingly uncomfortable mom help a dude out   
TG: jfc im back chillax   
TG: also do you have to keep calling me that   
TG: calling you what   
TG: particle accelerator   
TG: why would i call you particle accelerator   
TG: no u doofus thats for ur raps   
TG: calling me mom   
TG: oh sweet thanks   
TG: and besides the fact that you basically raised us i obviously do it to annoy you  
TG: *rolls eyes*  
TG: youd be better off askin our bro for rap help u know  
TG: nah  
TG: hes busy being a loner weirdo in the middle of the goddamn ocean as far away as he can possibly be from the rest of the family  
TG: plus i still havent gotten over that whole puppet thing  
TG: lmao  
TG: shut up  
TG: so hows aa going  
TG: fine  
TG: really  
TG: i mean isnt it kind of supposed to suck gigantic veiny donkey dick  
TG: ok yeah it blows  
TG: i mean i made some good friends and we all been stayin sober the last couple months but like  
TG: the whole god thing is  
TG: sort of a big deal with them  
TG: oh yeah  
TG: the big man HASS the power  
TG: dude are you srsly meming at me while i talk about my alcoholism  
TG: shit sorry  
TG: im just fuckin w/ u i loled  
TG: but yeah basically  
TG: like takin a “searching and fearless moral inventory” ok yeah cool ive been a shitlord and i gotta own that  
TG: but then its god this and god that  
TG: and they say you can use whatever higher power u want but i just  
TG: dont rly have anythin like that  
TG: well assuming you dont want to find another group since youre already blood brothers with this particular gang of drunks  
TG: why dont you just skip the god steps and do the other ones  
TG: make it a 7 or 8 step program instead  
TG: p sure they think those steps are kinda important  
TG: but hm i guess since i already did the admitting my shitlordiness thing the next step would be apologizin to EVERYONE  
TG: see that sounds productive and not like something that requires you to surrender to bearded old dudes in the sky  
TG: yeah....... just kinda... intimidating  
TG: just gotta buck up and do it tho  
TG: do u know if rose is still living at dads old place  
TG: yeah shes been sorting through all his junk for forever  
TG: but i havent heard much from her lately and what i do hear is weird even for her  
TG: :/  
TG: im sure shes fine  
TG: but since youre seeing her you can confirm yourself that she hasnt gone even further batshit than you have to be to write a bazillion pages of wizard battles  
TG: ok thx for everythin  
TG: good luck w/ur raps  
TG: thanks  
TG: see ya mom  
TG: (gdi)  
TG: see ya

***

Gravel crunched under the tires of Roxanne's car as she made her way down the Lalonde estate driveway that wound sinuously through heavily wooded forest. The setting sun barely filtered through the canopy of red and orange leaves, despite half of them already having fallen to the ground. The strained light combined with the thick old trunks covered in gray-green lichen gave the woods an unsettlingly ancient feel.

Roxanne rounded the last curve and the mansion sprang into view through a break in the trees. Whatever was keeping Rose so busy, it certainly wasn't home improvement. The dark gray paint flaked and peeled, and more than one lavender shutter was hanging askew, dangling from a single hinge. 

A small voice in the back of Roxanne's head was whispering that maybe this wasn't the best idea, that it might be better to just send Rose a letter, but she quashed it ruthlessly. _I'm not ashamed to meet her face to face,_ she thought. Before she could think too much more about it, she marched up to the door and thumped the huge pewter door knocker.

She had barely let go when the door swung back, revealing a gaunt silhouetted figure. “Hello, Mom. I'm surprised to see you here.”

“Rose?” she asked disbelievingly, squinting into the darkness.

“My apologies.” The figure retreated briefly, and Rose returned with a candle in a pitted brass holder. “The electricity hasn't been working lately, and I wasn't expecting any guests,” she said, raising one eyebrow ever so slightly. 

Roxanne's cheeks reddened. She knew this would be awkward, but she had forgotten how conversations with Rose never meant what you thought they meant. “Yeah, sorry, I should've called, but um, I'm not going to stay long so—”

“Nonsense, come in out of the cold,” Rose said, stepping back and sweeping an inviting arm into the hall. “I have a fire going in the parlor.”

“I just wanted to say—”

“Nothing that can't be said inside with a cup of tea, I'm sure,” Rose cut in.

“Fine,” Roxanne relented, stepping inside and shedding her coat and scarf. Satisfied, Rose turned and led the way to the parlor.

The inside of the house wasn't much better than the outside. Most of the doors were closed, likely to conserve heat, but when Roxanne did get a chance to see into a room in the flickering candlelight, piles of books and papers heaped on the furniture threw crazy shadows across dust-covered family portraits and knickknacks. Diagrams and old black-and-white photos covered the walls, some connected with pins and different colored strings, and a torn map on a desk traced the outline of a continent she didn't recognize.

Roxanne lowered herself uneasily into an armchair in the parlor while Rose put the kettle on. She studied her when she returned, as she set the candle down and rearranged her skirt to sit. The garment hung loosely off of her prominent hip bones, and the hand smoothing it paused a moment to mask a subtle tremor. It was hard to tell in the candlelight, but Rose's skin looked paler than usual, perhaps even having a tinge of gray. She had always been slender, but now her face looked gaunt, the skin drawn and tight with a tension Roxanne didn't remember cool, collected Rose ever possessing.

Rose leaned back but said nothing, letting the silence build. A clock on the mantlepiece ticked softly.

_Alright,_ Roxanne thought. _Time to make the fuck outta these amends._ “So...” she started.

“So.”

Roxanne swallowed. “I know we, uh... haven't talked in a while.”

“We haven't,” Rose agreed. “Not since you professed your incestuous feelings, vomited on my lap, passed out, and vanished before I awoke the following morning.”

Roxanne flinched, every word driving another hot needle of shame into her gut despite Rose's conversational tone. “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. She fished the green chip out of her coat pocket, displaying it to Rose in her palm. “Three months sober and counting.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Roxanne ignored the layers of meaning in the single-word response. “Part of the program is making amends to those we hurt through being monumentally selfish assholes, so... I'm sorry.” She kept her eyes focused on her hands while she forced herself to continue. “I've said a lot of really, REALLY stupid things, but that was easily the stupidest. Even if I hadn't been blitzed, there was no way you could've responded, and I should have sucked it up and just talked to you after. I know you don't owe me forgiveness, or anything, but just, for what it's worth, I'm sorry I hurt you.”

She chanced a look up, but Rose just nodded. “I see.” The kettle began whistling from the kitchen. “It appears our tea is ready,” she said, rising from the couch.

“'I see'?!” Roxanne said disbelievingly. “I'm barin' my fucking soul over here and all you've got is 'I see'?”

“There is nothing more to talk about,” Rose said as she moved towards the door.

Roxanne leaped up and grabbed her by the wrist. “Nothing to talk about? How about all this?” she yelled, gesturing to her sister's emaciated frame. “You look like you're fucking dying! I didn't expect you to forgive me or care that I'm just trying to find _something_ that matters besides sitting down at the nearest bar and never getting up, but something is obviously wrong here!”

Rose whirled around and, for the first time since her arrival, met Roxanne's gaze. 

Roxanne sucked in a sharp breath and dropped Rose's arm. While her body looked like it was fragile and wasting away, her purple eyes were shockingly vibrant, radiating the power and force her flesh lacked. The effect was magnetic, and Roxanne found she could not look away. _This_ was the Rose she remembered, the one who left her to tend to their brothers while she applied all the considerable faculties of her insatiable mind to questions of philosophy, psychology, and literature—this was that Rose, but amplified and purified.

_The Rose you fell in love with,_ that small voice whispered in the back of her head.

“You think I need help?” Rose asked. Her tone was still coolly pleasant, but there was a hint to the hardness that lie just below that veneer, the steel underneath the silk.

“I...” Roxanne swallowed. “Yes.” She managed to blink a few times while Rose assessed her with that blazing violet gaze.

“As you wish. But first, let me make us some tea.”

Roxanne blinked, surprised, before nodding and following her to the kitchen.

Shortly after, teacups in hand, they went to one of the open rooms Roxanne had seen on the way in. Rose cleared a space on the table and set down an old leather-bound journal. “You remember Professor English?”

Roxanne nodded. “She's the one who helped you with the research for your fifth book, right?”

“Correct. She found this journal on an anthropological expedition in Peru.” Rose opened it to a random page. The peculiar script packed in from margin to margin looked like no writing Roxanne had ever seen. “After conferring with her colleagues, she declared the language untranslatable, as it seems to be related to no other known writing,” she continued. “I had nearly forgotten about it, until I was sorting out Father's things in the basement, where I found this, and this.” She handed a sheaf of aged papers and a small photograph to Roxanne.

The papers felt as fragile as dead leaves, but Roxanne could see they were written in the same tight, angular script as the journal. The photograph was nearly as old, showing a young man with the same thin lips and straight nose that were the hallmarks of the Lalonde family, sitting next to an older man in a colorful poncho with a familiar bright, magnetic quality to his eyes.

“What does it mean?” she whispered.

Rose leaned in. “It means,” she said with a small, secret smile, “that if you are looking for 'something that matters,' I think you may have found it.” Roxanne wondered if Rose knew that her right hand was gently running up and down the edges of the journal's covers. “You're family. This appears to be family business. There is so much we could learn, so much we might do with the knowledge we acquire. And as much as I wish I alone were sufficient for the task, there is a—” she hesitated “—considerable burden that might be lifted with the assistance of another.”

“You... want my help?” Roxanne asked.

Rose raised Roxanne's chin gently with her index finger. Their eyes met again. “I do,” she said, and the sheer vitality in that purple glow ensnared Roxanne.

She nodded. “Where do we start?”

***

Roxanne had already taken a sabbatical for the semester, and as such saw no reason not to temporarily relocate to the Lalonde estate immediately. She dove headfirst into the project, eager to catch up with Rose and be as useful as possible.

Her sister, with her uncanny knack for long-dead languages and philosophers, handled the actual translation of the journal. Roxanne started off filtering through the piles of dusty records and artifacts still unsorted, but before long Rose began consulting with her on some of the puzzling diagrams and figures in the documents. Engineering demanded a degree of spatial reasoning that lent itself well to deciphering the odd illustrations, and slowly, the two sisters pulled together more and more of the journal's meaning. 

Roxanne rose from her hunch over a diagram that was probably a star chart and stretched. “Did you figure out those weird ten lines in the fourth chapter yet?”

Rose tsked. “Well, the first seven are clearly a reference to the previous chapter with the livestock sacrifice, but the last three... Listen:

“He stirs again, the sleeping god,  
he who dreams our lives in the swirling currents,  
he whose time will come once more.”

“Too spoopy.”

Rose shook her head and draped an arm around Roxanne's shoulders in a side-hug. “Still with the memes, after a month with no recreational internet. You're incorrigible.” She went back to her own work, but Roxanne could still feel the lingering warmth of the embrace.

Their pace accelerated until they were spending every waking hour delving into old texts and cross-referencing tables and charts. Roxanne should have been tired and worn down by their schedule but rather than lethargic, she felt charged with an electric energy, frenetically compelled to action. She didn't even care much about the sleep she was missing; her dreams had been disturbing lately anyway, though she never remembered them upon waking.

One night, after washing her face before retiring to her room for a brief rest, she blotted her dripping face with a threadbare towel. When she looked up to the mirror, Roxanne gasped. Her eyes were brighter than she'd ever seen them, as if they should be crackling with a wild pink energy. She threw the towel over the mirror.

Rose didn't ask, or move the towel.

At long last, as New Year's approached, they completed the translation.

“It's so frustrating,” Roxanne complained over their celebratory hot chocolate. “We finally have the stupid words in the right language, but we still don't know what most of it means.”

Rose just smiled. “I think we know enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to find the rest more... directly.”

Roxanne swallowed. “Rosie, you don't really think any of that stuff is... _real,_ do you? It's just stories from our great-times-a-million-grandfather who was a few french fries short of a Happy Meal, right?”

Her vivid amethyst gaze was answer enough. Roxanne would follow those eyes into hell itself, danger be damned. 

Rose stood. “There's a full moon tonight. If we're going to learn more, now's the time.”

***

Rose knelt in the middle of the symbol drawn in dark ashes on the basement floor, murmuring softly as she read from her notes in one hand and the journal in the other. Roxanne picked her way across the lines, careful not to smudge them while she placed the ritual components at particular intersections. She must have been more tired than she thought, because the design seemed to twist and warp as she tried to follow it with her eyes.

Rose was standing now, and raising her voice. The wooden beams of the house creaked above them, as if the mansion were trying to uproot itself and flee from Rose's lilting, sonorous voice. Roxanne tasted ozone in the air; her eyes darted at things moving in her peripheral vision that she couldn't turn quickly enough to see. “Rose, I don't know if this is—”

A puff of wind gusted out from the center of their design, and all the candles and lamps were extinguished at once. In the moonlit dark, the ash lines were now glowing with... with what? If it were not an oxymoron, Roxanne would have said it was a pure black light.

She tore her eyes away to focus on the figure in the center now hovering a few inches off of the concrete. “ROSE!” she shrieked. 

“It's alright,” Rose called. Her eyes were too bright for Roxanne to look at, the eerie light illuminating the rapturous expression on her face. “I'm about to break through something, I can feel it, it's—” Abruptly, her body contorted in sudden pain, ripping an agony-wracked scream from her throat.

Roxanne took a single step toward her before it hit her too, an alien intrusion worming itself into her mind, her _soul,_ twisting and writhing in her head as images too vast for her to understand flooded into her, sights and sounds and even tastes that were so repulsively incomprehensible they wrenched her entire thinking apparatus around itself. Roxanne clutched her temples, trying in vain to physically expel the probing _wrongness,_ but all she could do was howl wordlessly as it burrowed deeper. She could feel a building consciousness of the _scale_ of the entity and could not process how massive it was; this star-spanning god was pouring through the rupture, growing and growing and—

Stopping?

As her senses returned, Roxanne saw that she was on her hands and knees, and that the lights were back to normal. She glanced back; when she fell, she had knocked a carnation just a few inches off of its mark.

_Rose!_ Her eyes snapped to the center of the circle. Rose was sitting upright at least, but she was clutching her knees tightly to her chest, and her eyes were too wide—though, Roxanne was relieved to see, a perfectly normal shade of purple.

Roxanne crawled over to her sister. Every movement of her head sent an aftershock of horrible, impossible images and thoughts through her mind. She embraced Rose, who heaved with a single shuddering sob.

“Let's get the fuck out of this basement,” Roxanne murmured, helping Rose to her feet. Trembling, they ascended as fast as they could.

In the kitchen, Rose sat shaking in a chair while Roxanne frantically rummaged through the cabinets. “I can't get it out of my head,” she said hoarsely.

“Join the fucking club,” Roxanne said. She could still feel the residue of that alien probe on her mind too, and she wanted it gone the only way she knew how.

Finally, Roxanne fished the unopened bottle of vodka out of the lower cabinet. She poured a generous slug into two tumblers, not caring about the drops that splashed over the sides, and thrust one into Rose's still shaking hands. They both downed the liquor in a quick gulp, repeating the process twice more before slowing down, though they left the open bottle on the table. It wasn't water from the Lethe, but the comforting fog of chemical oblivion would have to do.

Deep below the mansion, deep in the under-dark of the world, something stirred with a shuddering of tectonic plates, then was still.


End file.
